So here's my latest thought while driving down the coast for the past several days:

What if we get rid of Skill as a stat? Now that Skill is used for all kinds of actions instead of just tests of skill. Just make the Skill die an Action die and be done with it. Spend an Action = spend an Action die.

stubby wrote:So here's my latest thought while driving down the coast for the past several days:

What if we get rid of Skill as a stat? Now that Skill is used for all kinds of actions instead of just tests of skill. Just make the Skill die an Action die and be done with it. Spend an Action = spend an Action die.

stubby wrote:So here's my latest thought while driving down the coast for the past several days:

What if we get rid of Skill as a stat? Now that Skill is used for all kinds of actions instead of just tests of skill. Just make the Skill die an Action die and be done with it. Spend an Action = spend an Action die.

I kind of like that. It makes Actions and Reactions easier to keep track of (If you spent the die on your turn, you can't use it for reactions), and in general goes along with the other dice-spending mechanics.
It would definitely still need to be in the statblocks in the same way as Skill, but the semantics of how they're used become a bit easier.

Mechanically, nothing. In terms of game concepts, it makes the connection between rolling a Skill die and spending an Action a lot more immediate and obvious, and it makes it more obvious that you roll the die for all kinds of actions and not just the ones based on skillfulness.

So now instead of rolling a Skill Die and spending an Action to see if your action is successful, you'd roll and spend an Action Die - the same as you roll and spend a Benny or roll and spend an SN die. It makes the game's dice mechanics one step more unified: rolling a die also spends it.

Quantumsurfer wrote:So would you get multiple action dice if you have multiple melee weapons? So you can counterattack? Or are you doing away with that altogether?

Attacks are a special case (you can also attack with multiple ranged weapons, if you're piloting a mech or a fighter jet or something). It still spends the die, but you get to roll it a bunch of times for attack rolls and melee damage and so forth. The die is still spent, though; you don't get to use it to bail or sprint or anything else once it's spent on attacking.

I had a funny idea that one of your options for Overskill (which would have to get its name changed also, now that it wasn't skill-related, probably to OTT for Over The Top Action or something so we could have OTTers) would be to just get another action, but it ended up being better just keeping it as-is. Largely because of the multiple-rolls problem when you have a bunch of weapons, leading to many potential extra actions instead of just one, but also because multiplying actions can add a whole bunch of dice of effectiveness rather than just one when you're operating large weapons or machinery.

I thought about changing it to just attacking multiple times with the same weapon, which seemed like a cool thematic solution but still ended up being unbalanced for larger weapons. Parrying multiple times also seemed cool but ends up slowing down the carnage too much. So none of my ideas for mechanical changes panned out, but the name change still seems like it'll give players fewer buzzwords to keep track of.